Of Horses Of Men (2013)

A scene from Benedikt Erlingsson's OF HORSES AND MEN, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: This is the first feature film written and directed by Icelandic theatre director Benedikt Erlingsson, best known in the film world for his acting role in Lars Von Trier's The Boss of It All

WHAT: "You going to let me catch you?" asks Kolbeinn, the dapper Alpha male of a small, isolated community of ranchers and tour guides obsessed with all things equine by tradition if no longer exactly by necessity. His question is to his pride and joy, a white mare he saddles up for a brisk gallop across the landscape to pay a call on a fellow horse-owner and her tri-generational but patriarch-less family. Indeed, Kolbeinn (played by internationally-experienced actor Ingvar E. Sigurðsson). His ride is a show for the audience, for himself, and for the entire plateau, as he is observed (often through telescopic lenses) by just about everyone across the plateau. The expanse between dwellings doesn't prevent a close-knit community from being a bunch of nosy neighbors, intensely curious about the potential blood-line mixing of any of the horses or humans in their midst.

This scene sets up an easy laugh that I'm not sure why I'm hesitant in giving away since it's actually telegraphed through very careful editing for minutes before. But perhaps the anticipation only increases the payoff. The audience I saw this scene with yesterday let out little chuckles and other utterances during the foreshadowing moments, and then erupted into a full-scale group belly-laugh once it arrived.

The scene introduces us to glimpses of all the key characters we'll be following through various vignettes throughout the rest of Of Horses and Men; the organizers of group riding and horse-culture immersion tours, an alcoholic husband; an attractive young equestrienne, a Spanish traveler, etc. Here they're briefly shown as observers of Kolbeinn's embarrassing moment, but soon enough they'll have their own adventures to make. Many of them result in some kind of tragedy. All of them revolve around horses.

There's no question that Erlingsson and his crew photograph these beasts with awe and care, although the grim fates that befall some of them and their riders counterbalance the film's leanings into Tourist-Authority-sanctioned territory. As such, the film fulfills the long-nurtured love affair between the motion picture camera and the horse, going back as far as Eadweard Muybridge and continuing through just about every Western and large-scale historical epic made during Yakima Canutt's lifetime. But I must admit I found the film's thematic paralleling of human and animal relationships to be frequently superficial, uninspired, and unworthy of the craft put into staging and filming. Perhaps I'm just slightly allergic to the overlapping vignette framework being employed here, for the same reasons that Magnolia is my least favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film and Crash my least favorite Best Picture winner in recent memory. Though Of Horses And Men is not as facile as a Paul Haggis film, the fact that I'm thinking of one at all makes me hesitant to enthusiastically recommend it to serious cinephiles. Trot with caution.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 8:45 tonight and 6:00 Monday at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: This is the only one of the films competing for SFIFF's New Directors Prize (only first- and second-time feature filmmakers are eligible) that I've seen so far, unfortunately. Luckily, all but one of the others (The Blue Wave) are still playing during the final several days of the festival. Here is the list of the competitors for the $10,000 cash award that last year went to the Turkish film Present Tense.

HOW: DCP

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 10 features the final festival screenings of Lav Diaz's Norte, the End of History and Hong Sangsoo's Our Sunhi. I'd have featured the latter for today's post had my friend Adam Hartzell not already written quite a bit about it for this blog.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Yerba Buena Center For the Arts began the biggest tribute to Studio Ghibli ever presented in the Bay Area on Thursday, and tonight's double-bill of Nausicaa And The Valley of the Wind and Whisper of the Heart gives a great sense of the broadness of the kind of work being done at that Japanese animation stronghold over the years.

All That Jazz (1979)

A scene from Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. 

WHO: Bob Fosse wrote and directed this.

WHAT: A 1979 film by a director who'd already proved himself one of the great auteurs of the 1970s with films released in 1972 and 1974 (one of which earned him the Best Director Academy Award), but who found his film, probably his most ambitious to date, defeated by Robert Benton and Kramer Vs. Kramer at the Oscars that year. At least he had the consolation of a shared Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this magnificent work.

That last paragraph could describe Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now but it just as easily describes Fosse and All That Jazz, which for me is easily his cinematic masterpiece. Too-often ignored in accountings of the great films of the 1970s, this highly-personal work, something of a dance-film extension of the themes of Fellini's 8 1/2, is one of the great films about artistic creation in the face of physical and creative roadblocks. It makes a particularly good comparison piece for those of us who saw Abuse of Weakness last night, but it's absolutely worth seeing on the big screen regardless. As Melissa Anderson wrote earlier this year in Artforum:

This phenomenal 1979 film, a work of “depressive exhilaration,” in the astute words of Sam Wasson, author of the excellent, recently published biography Fosse, was the director’s third (and final) Hollywood musical, following Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of Fosse’s 1966 stage production of the same name, and Cabaret (1972). All three movies are obsidian prisms reflecting the darker, seamier aspects of show business, informed by the desperate ambience that Fosse observed first-hand as a teenage dancer in the burlesque halls of his native Chicago. Those formative, often scarring years as an entertainer are re-presented in All That Jazz, in which Fosse’s self-regard is no match for his self-excoriation.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive, at 8:30 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: Although the San Francisco International Film Festival has made many changes in the 10 years I've been attending as press, the most talked-about changes (the five executive directors the festival has had during that time, most notably) don't appear (to me) to provide as much substantial transformation of the festival's character, in terms of the amount of quality works that an above-averagely-interested attendee could see every year. The more notable transformation, in my outlook, is the shift in dominant projection format over the years, to the point where I was earlier this week able to round-up all of this year's expected 35mm, 16mm and super-8 work in a single paragraph. Seeing Paul Clipson's incredible Bright Mirror shown from a Super-8 projector set up in the middle of the Kabuki's House 3, reminded me of how the festival a decade ago would set up a special projector in the middle of the room to show video works, as film was the Kabuki's standard format and the widespread dominance of DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) was only a futuristic imagining.

I have no problem watching DCPs of new films at SFIFF, especially those shot on video cameras in the first place (increasingly more of them), and my Senses of Cinema article on the 2005 festival used the role of digital production and distribution in fulfilling a film festival's mandate as a frame. If I were to write an update today, I'd stress how we're now at the point in the evolution of digital filming and presentation technology where a filmmaker insisting on shooting or projecting on film is now making a deliberate choice to greatly limit his or her options for processing, exhibition, and so on throughout the chain of getting images in front of audience eyes. Even films created in the age of celluloid, by makers who expected the subtleties of their manipulation of chemistry to impress their vision onto screens, are steadily being transformed (though the industry buzzwords are the paradoxical "digitally restored") into collections of electronic signals. Generally, the more high-profile the revival, the more likely it is to be digital-only and to replace all legitimate film-on-film distribution of a given title. The 2014 Cannes Classics line-up, for instance, will be the first-ever in that sidebar to present only DCPs and no 35mm prints.

Though I'm increasingly finding myself able to appreciate a DCP screening of classic films, I'm far less apt to go out of my way to see one than a 35mm print. Knowing that the latter is becoming scarcer and scarcer only ups the ante on the sense of "unique event" that running a physical print through a projector really was all along, no matter how ubiquitous it seemed. Scarcity of digital screenings of any given title feels far more artificial; there's far less of a physical barrier to a cinema projecting a digital copy of a classic than there is to screening one of a finite number of prints. Still, sometimes I want to see a movie on a cinema screen no matter how it's presented. It never really bothered me that prior SFIFFs included video-projected showings of Latin American rarities like Los Inundados and We Are The Music; how else was I going to see these great works otherwise? Short of going back in time to 2009 (the last time All That Jazz showed in 35mm in the Bay Area, as far as I can recall), tonight's showing is as good as we're likely to get.

HOW: All the usual sources have said that All That Jazz screens from a DCP. But the Film Foundation's own website lists it as a 35mm print. This discrepancy raises an eyebrow only because last year the Film Foundation shipped both a DCP and a 35mm print of The Mattei Affair to the festival, which was lucky because the DCP proved to be technically troublesome at the PFA. Assuming the festival is similarly prepared this year, might it be worth crossing fingers for a snafu?

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: SFIFF's Day 9 features another revived title: Lino Brocka's Manila In The Claws of Light. The final screening of the gripping marital-conflict drama If You Don't, I Will starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos and the sole festival screening of Boyhood with director Richard Linklater in person also happen today, although if you don't have a ticket already you'll need to wait in the Rush Line for these latter two showings.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A double-bill of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Sorry, Wrong Number defies the trend of DCPs superceding 35mm prints forever, as the latter fairly recently screened at the PFA as a DCP, but will show in 35mm, like the rest of the Stanford's current Barbara Stanwyck series. It runs through Sunday.

Abuse Of Weakness (2013)

A scene from Catherine Breillat's ABUSE OF WEAKNESS, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Catherine Breillat wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I have not yet seen Abuse of Weakness but I'm excited for the chance to follow a filmmaker who I greatly associate with the SFIFF over the years. In 2002 the festival showed her underrated Brief Crossing, and two years later she attended in person for a showing of Sex Is Comedy, which was a semi-autobiographical account of the making of her notorious Fat Girl. Shortly after that visit to San Francisco Breillat suffered a series of strokes which she recovered from well enough to appear at the Castro for the 2008 festival opening night selection The Last Mistress. These were followed by festival selections Bluebeard and The Sleeping Beauty in 2009 and 2011 respectively, and now after three films set in the far-off past, she returns to the very recent past. Abuse of Weakness is said to be based on Breillat's own autobiography since Sex is Comedy, starring Isabelle Huppert as a stand-in for herself. For reviews I direct you once again to Critics Round Up.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 9PM at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I understand Abuse of Weakness screens in the Kabuki's House 1, by far the largest screen the festival uses other than the Castro's, and worth going out of one's way to see films in. It's where I saw Brief Crossing and Sex is Comedy, and can't help but wonder if that's part of why I preferred those to Bluebeard, which unfolded in a more intimate space. Breillat's films do not eschew spectacular dimensions, and it seems unlikely that, despite theatrical distribution from Strand Releasing expected for Abuse of Weakness, this will be the largest theatre Frisco Bay movie lovers will ever be able to see it in. Note that I've learned Manakanama will screen in House 1 for its final festival screening this Monday afternoon. Wish I could go to that!

I'm impressed that the SFIFF picked a Breillat film to run in its sole screening on the festival's "Awards Night" tonight, when deep-pocketed donors spring for a chance to hobnob with festival awardees like Richard Linklater, Stephen Gaghan, Jeremy Irons and John Lasseter. In past years the "middle Thursday" programming has often seemed a bit calmer than most nights, with lots of second screenings of films already premiered. Does having the only festival showing of a major auteur work on the same night as this party signal something about a disconnect between the financial engine of the festival and the desires of local rank-and-cinephiles?

HOW: DCP

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 8 of SFIFF gives festgoers final chances at seeing the Viennese "Frederick Wiseman lite" documentary The Great Museum, Nobuhiro Yamashita's low-key twenty-something portrait Tamako In Moratorium, and the "director's cut" of Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Castro Theatre just revealed its full May calendar, which starts off tonight with a bang: 35mm prints of the late Vera Chytilová's Daisies and of Allan Moyle's rare gem Times Square.

Reversal Of Fortune (1990)

Screen capture from Warner Home Video DVD edition of REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, published 2001.

WHO: Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, directed by Barbet Schroeder, who started his career in in the trenches of the French New Wave, producing some of Eric Rohmer's and Jacques Rivette's greatest films before building a very unusual career as a director in his own right. It was shot by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who in addition to frequently working with Schroeder, had shot films for Michaelangelo Antonioni (including The Passenger) and Dario Argento (including Suspiria). But it's Irons who is most associated with Reversal of Fortune, turning the notorious Danish defendant in a tabloid-ready attempted murder trial Claus von Bülow into one of his career-defining roles.  Edward Copeland writes: "Irons' perfect mimicry of the Danish aristocrat is but a small portion of his outstanding performance that infuses Claus with a jet-black sense of humor about his plight."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight at the Kabuki's House 1, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: Only last week, the San Francisco International Film Festival announced it was giving its Peter J. Owens Award for screen acting to Jeremy Irons. It's becoming something of a tradition for SFIFF to lock up this particular award well after the rest of the festival is announced. Last year's Harrison Ford selection and 2011's Terence Stamp tribute were both late announcements. I don't know if this tradition is because actors are increasingly wary of committing to attend events like this weeks in advance of them, or because the festival likes the publicity bump a celebrity can bring to be timed apart from the full program announcement. At any rate, the events themselves are said not to suffer. I heard the Stamp interview in particular was one of the best in recent memory, and if I only hadn't locked my schedule in place to make sure I could see Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani in person, I'd have surely been there that year.

Tonight I'm tempted to go as well, though I'd probably be more tempted if the festival were showing Dead Ringers, an Irons-showcase masterpiece I sometimes cite as the best film I never want to see again, simply because it's so overpoweringly dark. But if it played in 35mm with Irons (or its director David Cronenberg, or perhaps other players involved) in person near me, I couldn't resist. I hear Reversal of Fortune is excellent as well, though; it's pedigree is certainly strong enough as you can see from my "WHAT" paragraph (which didn't even mention Glenn Close, who is also supposed to be great in it).

Though it was mentioned, along with this award, as a "To Be Announced" festival event during the April 1st press conference, the SFIFF's annual State of the Cinema address is nowhere to be seen, which is a disappointment. These events have been frequently wonderful food for thought; I'm particularly remembering Walter Murch's and Tilda Swinton's fondly. Last year's by Steven Soderbergh is a hard act to follow, but I would love to see the festival choose an archivist to present her or his thoughts on the current state of movies someday soon. Perhaps it will have to be next year.

HOW: Reversal of Fortune screens from a 35mm print, proving it's still possible to run reels onto one of the Kabuki's eight screens, even if it's now a rare occasion. The last time I attended such a screening was at last year's festival when The Insider was shown as part of a tribute to screenwriter Eric Roth, to an embarrassingly sparse crowd. It was beautiful.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 7 at the festival is your last chance to catch two films I wrote a bit about earlier this week: Stray Dogs and Bright Mirror, the latter being part of a shorts program that's been getting a lot of acclaim from experimental film scenesters.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Tonight and tomorrow a Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck double-bill of Remember the Night and There's Always Tomorrow screens as part of the Stanford Theatre's all-35mm Stanwyck series, which has only three more weeks in it and is worth heading down to Palo Alto for. The lobby's display of original documents concerning the most famous MacMurray/Stanwyck pairing Double Indemnity is an absolute must for anyone who appreciates that seminal film.

Stray Dogs (2013)

A scene from Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, playing at the 57th San Franicsco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations "stolen" whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness.

That 75-word capsule is all I'm allowed to write while we await a potential commercial distribution of this film, but there are plenty of more untethered critics who have written very thoughtfully and substantially on Stray Dogs and most (though surprisingly not Martin Tsai's useful reading) are linked on the addictive Critics Round Up website.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3:15 PM today at New People and 6:30 PM tomorrow at the Pacific Film Archive, both thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: It's been just over seven years since a new Tsai Ming-Liang feature film has appeared in Frisco Bay cinemas. The last was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which debuted here in April 2007 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. In the meantime, Tsai's 2009 film Face received mixed-at-best reviews at other film festivals around the world, bypassed local cinema screens, and has not even been officially released on DVD (though I've been told it's on Netflix Instant, I've never subscribed and have still yet to catch up with this work; I suppose I still hold out hope it may arrive through another means). And a new featurette called Journey To The West has just started making festival rounds, though it has yet to land here yet.

Watching Stray Dogs made me realize how rusty I've gotten at watching Tsai's films in cinemas, and made me want to have that experience again with one of his prior films. Not a moment too soon, I received an advance look at a program YBCA's Joel Shepard put together for this summer. One of the selections in this screening series is my own (a real honor and my first stab at programming 35mm, I picked a Robert Altman film that means an awful lot to me) but I think I'm equally excited to see the other nine films in the series. Eight of them I've never seen at all and in most cases have longed to for years, and the ninth (or should I say the first), screening July 20th, is a Tsai film I've only seen on home video before: The Hole. It was my introduction to his work way back when, and I'm thrilled to be able to get a chance to watch it in 35mm in just a few short months. Here's the full line-up for the YBCA series:

Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!
July 20 - Sept 25
Sun, Jul 20, 2pm Karen Larsen presents The Hole By Tsai Ming-liang
Thu, Jul 24, 7:30pm Brian Darr presents The Company By Robert Altman
Sun, Jul 27, 2pm Jonathan L. Knapp presents Colorado Territory By Raoul Walsh
Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm Cheryl Eddy presents Death Wish 3 By Michael Winner
Sun, Aug 10, 2pm Adam Hartzell presents Madame Freedom By Han Hyeong-mo
Sat, Aug 23, 7:30pm Michael Guillén presents Hell Without Limits (El Lugar Sin Límites) By Arturo Ripstein
Sun, Aug 24, 2pm David Wong presents The Exile By Max Ophüls
Thurs, Sept 18, 7:30pm Alby Lim presents Pietà By Kim Ki-duk
Sun, Sept 21, 2pm Lynn Cursaro presents Little Fugitive By Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley
Thurs, Sept 25, 7:30pm David Robson presents The Brides Of Dracula By Terence Fisher

HOW: Stray Dogs screens digitally, as it was shot.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 6 allows festgoers a final chance to see Manuscripts Don't Burn, Blind Dates and All About the Feathers, and features the first of two silent film/indie rock pairings of SFIFF57: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down playing new music for Charlie Chaplin's The Pawn Shop, Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, and more.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's Too Soon, Too Late screens digitally at Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland.